We have reviewed a lot of standalone free antivirus over the years. They include Kaspersky, Escan etc. and use their own virus definition sets. The disadvantage to these standalone antivirus is that one has to re download the complete executable every time they want the latest definitions. As a result a user could be using a standalone antivirus scanner that is weeks out dated. Why would an antivirus company want to release an up to date free version when one could get the paid versions with the up to date definitions?
The solution is Trend Micro System Cleaner. The actual system cleaner program is a small 4.7 megabyte file that only includes the scanning engine. Now, the standalone scanning engine is not effective without up to date virus definitions. The solution is to download the latest Trend Micro pattern files (virus database) and simply put them in the same folder as the free system cleaner. The Trend Micro pattern files are designed to be used in corporate and paid antivirus. However, they also work wonderfully in the completely free trend micro system cleaner. The virus updates or pattern files are located by the file names below. They are available from the trend micro website and hundreds of download sites across the internet.
- lpt$vpn.*** in a file called lpt***.zip
- ssapiptn.da5 in a file called ssapiptn***.zip
- (the *’s indicate different releases on different dates)
Anyways, considering this whole thing is kind of ghetto, I downloaded the latest pattern files for August 15th and put them into a zip file. The zip file contains both the virus pattern file and the antispyware pattern file. Trend Micro System Cleaner supports Trend Micro antispyware definitions (the same virus definitions included in the full antispyware product!) I provided this full set of definitions via uploading.com
Virus Scanning:
The Trend Micro System Cleaner is a very efficient scanner and significantly more than competing free antivirus. The reason is that the virus scanner runs in the command line and doesn’t need to display all of the nicest graphics etc. During scanning operation, the scanner used under 10% CPU power and about 100 megabytes of memory. However, according to Windows Resource Monitor, Trend Micro System Cleaner scanned about 4 megabytes per second. The software also includes auto delete functionality and moves the files to a backup folder that the program creates upon launch.
